Typing layouts.

You are doing it wrong!

Have you ever thought, why didn’t they put the keyboard in alphabetical order? Or why the alphabet even has an order in the first place?

You are probably reading this from sort of computer, whether it be a mobile device or a laptop. The main way that we as humans interact with our computers is through the keyboard, its our main ‘input’ source. So developing simple keyboard layouts was and is a pretty big deal. lets go through a brief history of how we got to where we are today, and where do we go from here?

Well the most prevalent english styled keyboard is in the QWERTY layout. QWERTY named after the first 6 letter keys found on the modern keyboard. It was a layout designed in the 1870’s by a life hacker named Christopher Latham Sholes, who was a newspaper publisher at the time. He became frustrated with the rate at which type writer users could produce well written pages. He saw the problem and came up with the answer!

People are amazing, we probably started out scratching symbols on rock cave walls, then found some plant and beat it into paper and wrote symbols on that, pretty much everything until the birth of the printing press was hand written. Imagine writing out by hand all the emails you send on a daily basis! I’d bet you’d write a whole lot less.

We as humans are naturally lazy, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. If something is hard we will re-design, re-architect and come up with a better way of doing things. Christopher Latham Sholes was probably sitting in his office frustrated by the limitation of how fast one could use a typewriter without its ‘type-bars’ hitting each other. he sat down and thought up a way so that the vowels could be separated from each other in such away to avoid these collisions. Fantastic for everyone in the early 1900’s, not so much today.

Its 2015 at the time of this article and guess what we don’t use type writers any more, but we are still use the QWERTY layout. This is amazing to me, i guess one could argue “well it would take a long time to change from one layout to another”.. but does it really? Or you could say “Well, it is picked by user preference, its not like everyone wants to change from QWERTY”.. but do they know there are better ways of typing?

Finding the least finger movements

Lets look at some of the factors when it comes to typing in the english language.

The middle Row of the keyboard, the starting point for your fingers. The row above your home row are the next easiest to reach with your fingers, thus it carries more letters and then the row below the home row, these are the hardest for your fingers to get to.

What we see the key to comfortable, efficient typing all revolves around the home row.

Home row, the land of happy fingers

Lets write a Ruby program to determine through mathematical analysis, which of all the layouts which one requires the least amount of movements in order to type out the top 20 000 most used english words. This then should tell us which of these three layouts the least amount of finger movement while typing.

By rating each letter according to its position from the home row, 1 being easy to press, 2 being a little more effort and 3 taking the most effort the result came to this:

1

2

3

total qwerty score is262017

total dvorak score is201019

total colmak score is199891

What do we see? Dvorak requires 23% less finger movement than Qwerty, and Colmak is slightly better yet by another 0.5%.

Now that math has done its job, you may think is it really worth changing over? I

I was a pretty good QWERTY typist, i was typing 72 wpm(Words Per Minute), and was getting to a point where i could touch type – not looking at the keyboard. But one day i decided lets try a different layout to see if i was standing on the side with less green grass. I decided on Dvorak, just because it was slightly more talked about than Colmak.

So i printed a little Dvorak layout and stuck it to my screen and away i went. At first it was excruciating typing 4wpm! After one week i got to about 12wpm and after two weeks i was at a good 30wpm. The secret to such rapid progress consistency, I had to answer urgent emails fast, but i would not swap my keyboard layout. But it forced me to touch type since the layout looks so different.

After 2 years of typing Dvorak i cant even believe that i used to type Qwerty. I find very little strain in my wrists, my fingers are never tired. I can touch type 100% which has increased my typing confidence exponentially, I feel like i am a better typist although i have only seen a 2% – 4% speed buff, which is about the average increase when swapping.

The thing that i have taken from this experience is that there could always a better way of doing something. Just it’s been done one way forever does not mean that its the only way of doing it, or even a better way of doing it.

So if your looking to improve your typing, or just for something interesting to learn, give Dvorak or Colmak a chance, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.